What it is
This mod adds 4 different station modules that, when attached to shipyards, will increase the level of new crew hires. The level increase will depend on how many unique academies you have built and how far you have upgraded them.
Each main race has their own academy variant and the skills they increase are different.
- Argon Public University: Increases morale, up to 4 stars if fully upgraded
- Teladi Center of Commerce: Increases management, up to 4 stars if fully upgraded
- Paranid Institute of Technology: Increases engineering, up to 4 stars if fully upgraded
- Split Naval Academy: Increases boarding, up to 3 stars if fully upgraded
Piloting starts at roughly 2 stars for the first academy you build and will increase with each subsequent unique academy you add to your shipyard. Upgraded academies will add even more to piloting level. Multiple academies of the same type will not stack.
How do I build them?
Academies are unlocked through research. Research is unlocked through missions. The mission objectives are simple; deliver a group of skilled crew members to your headquarters. There are 4 different groups in total, one for each academy.
Once you have delivered all groups and researched all academy blueprints, you unlock the missions for tier 2 upgrades. These follow the same pattern as the academy missions, but this time with higher skill requirements.
To get started, simply research any academy module from your research menu and the missions will be automatically added to your mission manager. Further details on requirements can be found in the mission descriptions.
Will NPC ships built at my shipyard also get better crew?
No. As an anonymous egosoft employee put it: factions keep the best pilots for their professional fleets.
Technobabble
The way this mod currently works is that whenever you build a ship at a player-owned shipyard, the level of the crew will be directly set based on how many academy modules are built and which research upgrades have been researched.
Ideally, you'd have different tiers of workforces that would increase at different rates, where higher tiered workforces would populate slower. And you'd then be able to select which workforce you'd want to use for each ship build. This currently seems to be beyond the scope of mods though. We'll just have to wait and see what egosoft will do with shipyard workforces. Right now it's very basic.
Is it save safe?
No. But because of a bug with mod dependent saves, this mod is currently flagged as safe to uninstall. This will most likely change once the bug is fixed. Until then, if you want to risk an uninstall you should at least remove the academy modules from your stations first.
Known issues
- Very rarely crew members you deliver will fail to change faction and won't be flagged for deletion. They'll just hang out at the landing pad and the game will simply let you move them back to your ship again. If this happens... lucky you, I guess?
- Sub-missions have their abort button enabled. This is unintentional. Aborting is disabled in the script however, so clicking abort won't do anything.
Version 0.30
- Korean translation added, provided by Merhaf (https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198049443990)
- Conforming to 4.0's new encyclopaedia-based research unlock system. Should still be compatible with 3.30.
- Changed the research ware UI sort order since the old value is now used by egosoft. (OLD: 501, NEW: 5501)
- Made mission script start cue condition a bit more stringent.
- Minor string fixes.
- Attempting to prevent naughty pilots from stealing your ships after delivery
- Attempting to fix NPC factions using the academies as habitation modules
Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2064683679
Direct Download (fixed link): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ey6h9G ... sp=sharing